I found a new tool online which starts to showcase how different the social networking online world is from what you may have seen as conventional reality. Stories, and in this case, news stories have always been seen as a journalistic expression, where one person creates a story or narrative to explicate some newsworthy event. The new online app Storify shows a different way to tell a news story…
I saw that the Make Use Of.com site was providing invites t this service (here), but the fact is that you can apply on your own to get an invitation (which may take as much as a day to get a reply…). The fact is that Storify ‘makes’ stories but collating readily available social networking information. You can use Facebook entries, Twitter tweets, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, RSS feeds, and even clippings from any web page. Here is a Storify ‘story’ about how Storify works: How storify works – as told through Storify. Beyond this example, here are a few videos describing in some detail how to use this new app…
For what it’s worth, I think that this is a quite intriguing idea, but there are some obvious limits to what you can effectively use this format to describe. If you have a breaking news story which you want to present using these sorts of transient information, this is the tool for you. On the other hand, if you want to present information which may obscure or not necessarily based upon places, people, or are just not that visual, the old school methods of using elbow grease may be the best way to go…
This may end up being a really worthwhile adjunct tool for reporters and journalists; I could see that a tool like this might have some value if used for student presentations.
